Electricity issues often pushed to back burner in energy discussions

The world of energy has entered a new phase, while reasserting its place in the world headlines — oil, pipelines, OPEC, fracking, gasoline prices, peak oil, tar sands and natural gas to mention the most overly discussed.

In the meantime, another important Wisconsin and American energy story — electricity for the present and future of America and its electrical grid — has been pushed to the back page of the news. All but lost, in a newly updated (Nov. 26, 2014) EPA 111d proposal, is the fact that it essentially puts national energy and environmental policy in the hands of the EPA.

This is surely an historical mistake, especially now that we have two contradictory legal clocks ticking at the same time: (1) The enforcement of the new EPA environmental rulings of 2014 called 111d, which the EPA will begin implementing in June; and (2) the Supreme Court, which will be deciding by June whether the EPA has the constitutional right to enforce the 111d ruling it has formulated without any state or national mandate.

Just about the time EPA will begin implementing its new ruling, the Supreme Court will likely make its ruling of constitutionality of the EPA's 111d in June. This is particularly important now that Professor Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, has filed a 36-page refutation of the EPA's constitutional right to make new rules. As Tribe puts it, "It is a remarkable example of executive overreach and an administrative agency's assertion of power beyond its statutory authority."

Historical setting

As a backdrop, here is a brief history of utility regulation in the U.S.:

First, as for legal precedent, the states have been legally responsible for providing reliable and environmentally safe electricity to their states through Public Utility Commissions and regulated power plants for the last 125 years. It remains the same to this day, without exception.

Second, the 50 separate Public Utility Commissions (and their National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners) have been responsible for working with state governments, power plant operators, the business community, state environmental groups, consumer groups and transmission companies to provide the electricity to power the largest economy in the world. For example, 47 states have demand-side energy efficiency projects, all with measurable results; 38 states have Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS); 10 states have voluntary market-based Green House Gas (GHG) emission trading programs and numerous large individual companies — Publicly Traded Utility Companies — have been pursuing voluntary emission reduction strategies.

Third, on the national environmental front, the reduction of methane emission has been 16.9 percent since 1990, according to the EPA. The carbon emissions level has fallen to the lowest level per capita since 1961, with overall reductions of 12.9 percent in the last five years. And as for "global warming," there has been no measurable increase in temperature over the last 15 years or so.

Complications

Further complicating matters, are the following:

The 21st century media has becomes quite divided and partisan in its reporting of energy and/or environmental issues. While the new EPA ruling would shutter approximately 100 of the existing 500 coal-burning power plants in 30 states, there are 1,200 500-megawatt power plants under construction or planned in the rest of the world, including China, India, Germany, Japan, etc.

Impartial studies and reliable statistics are much, much harder to find, and predicting the world's future is impossible, which makes the most recent International Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC), of November 2014, worrisome because it is predicting 85 years into the future, while not even addressing the "pause" in global warming over the last 15 years.

Also, the newly updated EPA proposal of 626 pages, plus a 575-page appendix, includes EPA's projected health benefits hypothesizes that EPA's plan will prevent 2,000 to 6,600 premature deaths, 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children, 2,700 to 3,000 hospital admissions and 470,000 to 490,000 missed school and work days, which is simply scientific conjecture.

It can easily be said that the current divisions of labor and legal responsibility in Wisconsin and the states, state legislatures and their Public Utility Commissions have created the most efficient mechanism for electricity in the world, from which the U.S. can continue to pursue economic development, energy independence and environmental safety. We are still the marvel of the capital formation and entrepreneurial universe, all without federal regulatory mandates.

If and only if the EPA's 111d is ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court, may I make a modest proposal? The EPA should postpone their implementation of 111d for another year until at least June 2016, or more properly until after the presidential election of 2016, so that the entire reliable electricity communities — power plants, transmission companies, state regulators, investors, state and federal legislatures — can properly do their duties.

Stephen Heins lives in Sheboygan and is former vice president of corporate communication for Orion Energy Systems, a publicly-traded company based in Plymouth that produces innovative energy and lighting systems. He is currently a part-time analyst for Tocqueville Assets of New York. He is a frequent speaker and has published dozens of articles on energy management, the utility industry and environmental issues for leading newspapers, energy and trade magazines.